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Yes, Spencer Arnold is very very good at pointing out the lulz with Coach’s Eye. So far we’ve seen him comment on things like Colm’s package, my mummy arms, and a veritable plethora of obvious flaws with really bad lifts. Today, however, I asked him to take a look at a really—seemingly—good lift.

Elisabeth hit a 100kg (aka 220#) Clean & Jerk in the middle of Saturday’s 60 minutes of work. Yes, that is a huge lift and she is pretty consistent with it, but Spencer and I both think that with a little work she’ll be closer to 250# consistently (current PR is 230#). This critique goes to show that even people with huge numbers can still benefit from coaching.

I’ve posted the lift at full speed (looks pretty good), and Spencer’s slowed down critique (not so good). If you’re not intimately familiar with the lifts you will probably be shocked at how many things could be wrong with a Clean & Jerk that’s so big it would easily put Elisabeth in the top 10 of American Weightlifters, and in the top two of competitive exercisers. Guess what? Weightlifting is an Olympic sport—if it was easy it would be your mom. (Sorry, too much?)

Notes: If you are proficient at these, treat this as a slow/controlled AMRAP. If you cannot do any absolutely strict, then practice with as little help from the hips as possible.

Conditioning

Alternating Tabata of:

Ring Dips
Ab-Mat Situps

Notes: This is 16 total alternating rounds of 20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds rest. For Ab-Mat Situps the movement begins with hands touching the floor overhead, and finishes when both hand touch the feet after coming to a upright seated position.

I didn’t realise how tired I would be by the time I got to these. The ring dips were hard from the start and my midsection copped a caning trying to stay tight in the dips. Needless to say that just made the situps harder. No abmat so just regular.

Just watched this twice. Great insightful commentary. One question: Is the last note regarding rear knee position that the knee itself should be directly under the hip (and therefore the shoulder and the bar as well) at the landing? Thanks in advance.

Long(er) answer: The more your rear knee extends behind you, like EA’s does in this video, the more anterior tilt you have in your pelvis. This forward (and sort of rotational) shift in the pelvis results in a less stable landing position and can potentially cause lifters to ditch the weight forward. This knee under the pelvis also helps split the total load of the body and barbell evenly between both feet.

To *me*, as an ex-gymnast, I really have to fight *not* to land as EA does. To a gymnast, that’s how you would land! So, it’s hard to relearn landing with a bent leg (!). And… I’d like to see this from the front; it looks to my very inexperienced eye that EA’s L foot moves more than her R in her clean (about 1:15)? Which made me wonder if E is left or right handed, bc I know sometimes that strong side/weak side thing comes out in odd places. Enyhoo…

He’s saying her back leg is a bit too straight here. Ideally her back knee would be bent, bringing her thigh to a slightly more vertical position with the knee more in line with the hip. Something like this

Skill:
10 min strict MU practice, not sure how many I got but around 5:00 I started to fail so started using a bit more momentum – kept hips out of it but used the speed from a fast arm pull to get me over.

Your using your arms way too much…when your in the bottom position your arms aren’t even full extended aka you’ll never be able to hold heavy weight overhead/shoulder flexibility and mobility is lacking…your hip mobility is great, but your shoulder/posterior/thoracic mobility and stability is poor…I would definitely do some work on those areas to help open them up to allow you to achieve a better position overhead…check out the mobilitywod.com for some movements to preform pre lifting and do them every day. This will greatly improve your positioning on your snatch before anything else you do. Lastly, touching on the arm usage, try practicing the feeling of using your hips in extension as your source of power instead of arming it, as you are in the video. To snatch efficiently you have to allow your body to move the weight vertically followed by your trunk, legs, etc supporting it in the bottom position, most notably your arms…until then your arms should not have a substantial role in the first 2 pulls…Hope this helps my friend!!! All the best.

huge help man thanks. I agree with everything. Let me tell you it takes everything I have to try and lock those arms out. My mobility sucks ass up there. I couldn’t even do the OHS yesterday. I watched Jon Norths hit drill this morning and seems like more of what your talking about with more hip usage and no arms. I’m going to try that. I think I’ll just stay with light weight with snatches and ohs until my mobility gets better and doesn’t frickin hurt.

10 min Strict Muscle Up work – Done 5 or 6 strict. I love muscle ups on wooden rings, so much better than plastic or metal.

All in all a very good day and feeling strong in all my pulls for snatching considering that I haven’t touched a barbell in a month. Snatch at 220 felt great, stuck both attempts but couldn’t stand it. Probably due to the fact that I did a 10k fin in full combat equipment this morning. 225 is right around the corner. I need to get my legs back!!!

Oh man! Been following the main site programming for years and made some great improvement. These WODs are WAAAAAYYYYY beyond my usual! I am so glad someone knows what I need. A year of this and I will be out of control! Thanks Outlaw!

A few fails, but otherwise these felt pretty good tonight. I wanted to keep going..

2a) 100kg all sets – Perfect weight here
2b) 60kg, 65kg, 70kg, 75kg, 80kg – I started real light because I was babying my sore left wrist. All sets were very easy – Should’ve started at 80kg and gone up from there. I’ll do that next time..

Conditioning

Ring Dips – 6,6,6,6,6,6,6,6
Situps – 10,10,10,10,6,10,8,10

Ring dips started easy (paced it hard out) but by the last 2 rounds I was barely holding on and kipping heaps. Situps got hard.